Brenda Schmidt is a naturalist and visual artist living in Creighton, a mining town on the Canadian Shield in northern Saskatchewan, where she explores creative paths between the natural and digital worlds. Author of four books of poetry, including More Than Three Feet of Ice (Thistledown, 2005) and A Haunting Sun (Thistledown, 2001), as well as a book of essays, her work has been published, performed, shown and broadcast across Canada and was part of a poetry installation at the University of Exeter (UK). A past reviewer of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry for Quill & Quire, she founded the Ore Samples Writers Series in 2016 and currently serves on the Sage Hill Writing board of directors. Her work is included in The Best of The Best Canadian Poetry in English: Tenth Anniversary Edition (Tightrope, 2017). She is the seventh Saskatchewan Poet Laureate (April 2017 to December 2018).

Insightful and often humourous, Culverts Beneath the Narrow Road takes us on a journey of connecting people and nature through the unassuming culvert.

A culvert anchors a key scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s movie The 39 Steps and a scene in Two for the Road starring Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney. Culverts appear in books by Tony Burgess, Dennis Cooley, Alice Munro, Annie Proulx, and Virginia Woolf. Culverts called to Brenda Schmidt’s imagination as well. As a child she played in and around their steel dark openings and took risks. In the daring poetry and prose of Culverts Beneath the Narrow Road the risk-taking continues. In her journeys, she asked people from all walks of life — construction workers, farmers, biologists, writers, musicians — about their culvert stories. Their recollections of experiences with or near culverts, both dark and light, gave voice to her own experiences, providing another sense of the connections we share and the way stories emerge and flow. Schmidt does this by using the stories as a jumping off point when they call up her own memories. She expands on interview quotes, stretching and bending them to create new stories and poems.

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Schmidt’s poetry is the Canadian wilderness. From the tundra to the prairies, it reads like a naturalist’s tour of the Canadian north. In language both deft and pure, Schmidt creates the relationships between external and internal landscapes, examining the impacts left by the travellers who seek the wealth of the north’s resources. More Than Three Feet Of Ice measures the non-renewable against the renewable, and the past against the present, in one of the last frontiers on earth. Praised by such contemporaries as Lorna Crozier, Brenda Schmidt has emerged as a distinctive voice, necessary and appropriate for the conscience of our time.

“Every once in a while a poet comes along whom you suddenly know you’ve been waiting for. Clear-eyed, original, imaginative. Brenda Schmidt is such a poet. She makes a familiar landscape unfamiliar in a most disarming way.” — Lorna Crozier

These elegant lyrical poems are inspired by the fictional character of Flin Flon in J.E. Preston Muddock's 1905 novel The Sunless City, and the beautiful environs of the town bearing his name.
Language becomes a canvas upon which nature and a nameless human longing are entwined in a haunting wordscape of memory, love and desire.